كَانَا were in Arabic
كَانَا is how you say “were” in Arabic.
Arabic
English
The audio uses AI voices.
Example sentence
أَبَرُّ مَنْ كَانَا فِي هَذِهِ الْأُمَّةِ بِأُمِّهِمَا
More dutiful to their mother than anyone in this community.
كَانَا they were
This is the past 'to be' verb with a DUAL ending, '(the two of) them were', its shape marking exactly two subjects. So the count again lives in the verb-ending, not a separate word. It sits inside the relative clause, describing the pair within the community that the comparison measures against.
The English is machine-translated.
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More example sentences
وَفِيهَا أَنَّهُمَا كَانَا عُرْيَانَيْنِ
And in it they were both naked.
كَانَا they were both
The 'to be' verb in the dual past, '-a' marking exactly two subjects, Adam and Eve. It supplies the 'were' that Arabic otherwise omits, anchoring the description that follows; the dual carries 'the two of them were'.